The present invention relates to information capturing and storage and more particularly to data retrieval, capturing, formatting, storage, display, and reporting on selected data and information from multiple web pages by a user.
The present invention addresses the problems associated with conveniently retrieving and storing information from web pages such as may be retrieved from the Internet. Currently, one can go on to the World Wide Web and retrieve information in the form of web pages (which is commonly formatted in the so-called HTML data format). It is common for a user who is investigating a particular subject on the World Wide Web to encounter a website having multiple web pages, describing, each depicting, and illustrating multiple and various aspects of the chosen subject matter. A common problem arises in that the user who is researching the subject matter finds the information available to them both overwhelming and not organized the way the user wants. That is, although the information on one particular web page may be organized in and of itself, portions of the information on that web page may be irrelevant to the user, portions may be cumulative to information previously seen by, or not relevant to, the user, and the information will rarely have an organizational structure associated with any other web page previously seen by the user.
A common method of navigating the World Wide Web when doing subject matter research is unfortunately to printout all web pages encountered so the user can, after the navigation session ends, sort and organize the various web pages printed out into some sort of coherent structure for use in the research. This process is time consuming and unnecessarily paper consuming.
The technology presently exists to call up a web page in a web browser, highlight a portion of text in the web page and copy that portion onto the clipboard feature of a locally running operating system or computer application. However, if one wishes to create accumulation of text portions from a variety of web pages at a variety of web links, the user must access the first web page, highlight a first portion of the first web page, copy the portion to the local clipboard, open a local application such as a word processing application, paste the clipboarded portion into a document of the word processing application, and then repeat the entire process for all of the remaining portions of all the remaining web pages of all of the remaining websites. In the end, the user will have the document in the word processing application (or other such similar application) that contains accumulation of the desired subject matter clips. There is, however, a variety of different problems associated with that procedure. First, the procedure is extremely tedious and cumbersome in highlighting, clipboarding, and pasting so many different portions of so many different web pages since the user must constantly flip back and forth between the web page browser, and local word processing application to cut and paste the various portions of the web pages desired. In addition, the portions of the web pages may not necessarily be in formats conducive to pasting into the particular application (such as the word processing application or other such application) being employed. Third, the highlight, cut and paste procedure is not simple and user friendly.
The present invention provides a cumulative note taking feature, sometimes referred to herein by the nomenclature eNotes, which allows a user to identify portions of a web page that the user wishes to collect, and automatically collects and cumulates the portions into a clipboard upon a particular prompt. The accumulation of clipped portions can be printed out or emailed to the user when they indicate that they are finished with the web page.
In accordance with the present invention, the identification of the portions can be performed locally at a user workstation by a local application interacting with an eNotes enabled web page downloaded to the browser of the local workstation. The organization of the eNote portions are performed at a server such that the identification of selected portions by any particular user or by an accumulation of users can be monitored.